Thread: To HHT or to not HHT? That is the poll...

I didn't vote. If there was an option that said it works but isn't necessary for a decent shave I would have gone for that. I can get a razor up to that level and I am happy when I do but I have shaved with some that didn't pass HHT and got a good shave.

Goes back to the individuality of skin and whisker types. More then two passes and I get irritation no matter the razor, the prep or the soap/cream. Others routinely do 3 and 4 passes. Maybe I have a lighter weight of whisker then some of the other folks out there. Some may need a razor that sharp and some may not.

Here is one rule that you are forgetting, for any test to be reliable it has to be standardized, Now I can standardize my HHT, but it only means something to me....
If I do just about any test, the same way, using the same equipment, and it tells me something then it is a reliable test... If you change anything in the test to attain the results that you wanted, then you just re-qualified the test, there by making it unrelaiable...

Now after all that I have to agree with Alan, it tells me the razor is sharp, it doesn't tell me if the shave is smooth.... But my HHT is reliable to me, because it does tell me something about the state of the edge....

Wow!!!! that was some serious double talk there

I got some blades that pass HHT and don’t shave for diddly squat.
I have some blades that do not pass HHT and shave rather well.
Final analysis is that I need to find a rich, beautiful woman who will hone all my blades perfectly and leave me free to worry about world peace and feeding the poor and other nobel causes.

from my experience, when i got a hair pinging, i'd actually over honed and created cracks on the edge,

so the hair was passing into the V that had been created along the edge and would ping off,

but was terrible to shave with,

I think the shave test is the best test to see if a razor is shave ready

Well, I'm going to disagree with Glen. I don't care whether HHT works for everyone. It works for me. In the confines of my parameters, it is reliable and I voted so. YMMV.

X

Originally Posted by kahunamoose

I got some blades that pass HHT and don’t shave for diddly squat.
I have some blades that do not pass HHT and shave rather well.
Final analysis is that I need to find a rich, beautiful woman who will hone all my blades perfectly and leave me free to worry about world peace and feeding the poor and other nobel causes.

that's what i need .. that, and one that will shave me and i can shave her and live happily ever after.

It is a reliable test for ME. I does not work for everyone. It tells me if my razor is ready for a shave test.

To me the HHT is a reliable test, which tells me when the razor is ready for a shave test, it doesn't tell me if the razor will be a smooth shaver, it just tells me it's time to do a test shave.

I have found HHT to be completely unreliable. To be honest it tells me very little. For example, coming off a DMT 1200 after setting the bevel, it will pass. That does tell me something -- time to move onto the next hone. But after moving onto the BBW and coticule, the HHT invariably fails. Does that mean I've dulled it? Absolutely not. Others say it's a quirk and characteristic of the honing properties of the coticule, but given that many of us prefer coticules, the HHT therefore falls down for a lot of people.

Another problem I have with HHT as a test for shave-readiness is that it is no indicator of smoothness. In fact quite the opposite -- when I used pasted paddles, putting it through diamond 0.5 and 0.25 would slice through any wisp of a hair, but the resulting shave I always found way too harsh. Sharp, but harsh, is not 'shave ready' for my own liking.

HHT is good for assessing a certain stage in my honing progression and telling me when to move on, but for refining the edge for shave readiness I tend to use TPT and, ultimately, a shave.

In my four months of newbishness, I've gone back and forth. I've finally decided that I'm a proponent of the HHT test, but I have my own set of standards on whether or not a blade passes the test. If a hair is grabbed and split down the middle, that's a fail. If the hair bends substantially before cutting, that too is a fail. If the blade grabs the hair and maks a "ting" noise when it's cut, yup, that's a fail, too. My standard for passing is much like that cool new video that was recently posted... I gotta find a link to it so you know better what I'm talking about, but anyway.... if a hair cuts in two when it's gently applied to the blade like it just had it's back broken, that's a pass.

One way to think about the HHT.... how much pressure do you have to apply to a hair to get it to pass the HHT? If you use my standards for the HHT, almost zero. OK, not *zero*, but an amount of pressure so small as to almost be immeasurable. Well, that's the same amount of pressure that's going to be needed to cut the hair on your face. Seriously, think about that for a sec... if you have a blade that is so sharp that hairs are splitting at the merest touch, that's exactly what's going to happen to the hairs on your face! OK, sharpness and ease of hair cutting isn't the end all and be all of factors that make a blade shave comfortably, but it *is* one of the main ones. Now if you can smooth that edge (getting rid of the coarse scratch marks) all the way down to stropping and still have it passing the HHT to my standards, I honestly believe you're gonna have a great shave. And those face hairs are going to be giving it up as easily (with the same amount of pressure) as the hair did on the HHT.

Standard disclaimers apply.... YMMV, I'm a noob, lot's of other ways to do it, etc. etc. (but I stick with what I said. )